When the EMR goes down

IT people that work at a hospital: yes, your department now truly influences whether patients get better or worse, and indirectly, live or die.

Comments

Anonymous
When my former clinic went EMR and computerized prescribing, I stashed and kept hand a stack of chart forms and script pads. My partner naively did as told. Which of us do you think just kept working and stayed on schedule when the computers went down versus having a catastrophe with the whole day ruined?
Anonymous
I worked in one of the areas struck by the hurricanes a couple of years ago in a clinic with a mainframe based EMR system. They had thought of everything. The computer was high and dry, they had an independent power source. Almost everything. Their generators could not run the AC enough to cool the mainframe facility, and the computer had to be shut down to save it as the room overheated.
One of about 400 docs who had refused to put his files in the mainframe (or even in the chart room before that), was able to keep working without interuption. Other departments it turns out had been non-compliant with the fascist edicts to eliminate paper and had an assorment of departmental partial records that they used to keep operating. Moral: In healthcare bureaucracies, non-compliance is good.

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